Tag: mobile

overpriced data roaming

You shouldn’t complain if something gets cheaper. But if something just gets 7 times cheaper from one day to the next, then that leaves you thinking whether the price offered so far might have been a tad bit too high.

I’m talking about Swisscom’s data roaming charges.

Up to now, you paid CHF 50 per 5 MB (CHF 10 per MB) when roaming in the EU. Yes. That’s around $10 and EUR 6.60 per Megabyte. Yes. Megabyte. Not Gigabyte. And you people complain about getting limited to 5 GB for your $30.

Just now I got a press release form Swisscom that they are changing their roaming charges to CHF 7 per 5 MB. That’s CHF 1.40 per MB which is 7 times cheaper.

If you can make a product of yours 7 times cheaper from one day to the other, the rates you charged before that were clearly way too high.

SMS is dead

BeejiveIM is the first multiprotocol IM application for the iPhone that supports the new background notification features of firmware 3.0. Yesterday I went ahead and bought that application, curious to see how well it would work.

And just now my phone vibrated and on the display, there was an IM message a coworker sent me via Google Talk. The user experience was exactly the same as it would have been with an SMS – well – nearly the same – the phone made a different sound.

So the dream I had many moons ago (6 years – boy – how time flies) has finally come true, with one difference: Whereas back then the MB cost CHF 7, now it’s practically free, considering that I’m unable to actually use up my traffic quota and even then, it’s only CHF 0.10 now.

So let’s keep that in mind and also consider that SMS pricing hasn’t changed in the last six years.

So while IM was 52 times cheaper than SMS back then, now the price advantage ranges from somewhere between 3500 times cheaper and infinity times cheaper.

SMS pricing needs to be looked at. This just cannot be.